With its covered front porch, wooden siding and low-pitched roof, the 1909 Craftsman on 24th Avenue looks like so many others in the city. But this unassuming house is flipping the script on gentrification and displacement in Seattle’s Central District.
The late Frank and Goldyne Green purchased the property after uprooting from Arkansas in the late 1940s, settling in the Central District as discriminatory housing and lending practices limited where African Americans could buy property.
When, in 2016, the house risked going up for sale to pay for the care of the widowed nonagenarian Goldyne, one of her descendants did something different: With a group of artists, he transformed the house into an art space. Since its 2019 opening, Wa Na Wari — “our home” in the Kalabari language of Nigeria — has become a thriving, esteemed cultural hub where people can see artists from across the African diaspora show work in former bedrooms; musical performances liven up the backyard; oral history projects take root; and people grab free community meals. Wa Na Wari paying rent to Goldyne, thanks to revenue from donations, meant they could forestall a sale.
But they were on borrowed time. Goldyne, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and died in 2020, did not leave a will and the house would very likely have to be sold as part of probate proceedings. Now, Goldyne’s grandchildren have come together to purchase the house through a new nonprofit, guaranteeing its use as a Black art and community space for at least the next 10 years. (The sale closed late last year and cleared a crucial probate hurdle this past month, on the eve of Wa Na Wari’s fifth-anniversary celebration.)
This novel approach isn’t just a local success story of an art space establishing stable footing in a costly real estate market. Amid increasing awareness of the lasting impacts of Seattle’s racial segregation and resulting low homeownership rates for Black Washingtonians, it’s also a blueprint for others in the Central District and similarly threatened neighborhoods across the country. “Art,” said Wa Na Wari co-founder Elisheba Johnson, “can be a driver to help other people keep their house.”
Matthew Richter, co-founder and former director of Seattle’s Cultural Space Agency, said the model is indeed replicable. “Wa Na Wari is what happens when community members stop waiting for the system to catch up to them, and start showing the system the way to go,” he said. “It’s a perfect example of the revolutionary role real artists serve in society. … They’re not here to make pretty objects, they’re here to invent things, to inspire systemic change by modeling true innovation.”
Enclave
In the family’s telling, Frank and Goldyne Green’s story is one of “making a way out of no way.” Despite rampant discrimination, restrictive covenants and lending practices that limited property ownership for Black Americans and other barriers, the Greens found a way to build community and stability. Over the years, as they purchased more nearby houses for their growing family, their 24th Avenue enclave grew into an intergenerational hub that smelled of greens and resounded with the shrieking of kids playing in the courtyard.
On a wintry afternoon late last year, four of the Greens’ grandchildren sat around a folding table in the living room of the house at 911 24th Ave. Siblings Ibiere Seck, Tonye Wokoma, Inye Wokoma and Cheikh Yirim Seck, who formed the nonprofit that purchased the house Wa Na Wari is in, described it as a place where the door was always open, food always on the stove, and a roof and a plate available for someone who needed it, family or not.
“It was all centered around family and food,” said Cheikh Yirim Seck. “It was all about community when [Frank] started out on that mission of investing in properties in order to ensure that his family had places to stay.”
But over time, as urban renewal, development, rising real estate prices, predatory lending that disproportionately targeted Black and Latino homebuyers and certain zoning decisions displaced thousands of the neighborhood’s Black residents, many of those properties slipped out of the family’s hands. The cost to take care of the aging grandparents and houses simply became too high.
“We grew up in the house behind us, and it’s not ours anymore,” Ibiere Seck said. “Everyone’s gone. The neighborhood looks the same, in a sense — I recognize the houses [but] I don’t recognize the people,” she said, tears springing in her eyes.
After Goldyne Green died, Inye Wokoma and his siblings founded The Frank and Goldyne Green Cultural Land Conservancy, a nonprofit aimed at avoiding the sales of Black-owned homes, and making them available for cultural use.
No one in the family could afford to buy the house at 911 24th Ave., listed for $1 million, outright. Wa Na Wari didn’t want to buy it either, Johnson and Inye Wokoma said, “as a matter of values” — Wa Na Wari has different leadership, and keeping the family not just involved but in charge was key.
The funding to start the conservancy and buy the house — for $1.2 million — comes from a variety of private sources, including individual donations, local philanthropists and the Bill & Melinda Gates and Satterberg foundations.
The city of Seattle has also awarded $2.4 million in funding to the conservancy, which the group plans to use toward the purchase and development of the Greens’ last remaining home in South Seattle, to be used for public programming focused on cultural anti-displacement. That money will come from the city’s Strategic Investment Fund, a one-time $30 million funding opportunity for communities at risk of displacement to acquire real estate for community ownership.
This funding will likely come with some strings attached, requiring that the conservancy continue to use the house for public benefit through community arts and cultural programming. That this agreement with the city is probably coming in the form of a restrictive covenant on the house — the same legal tool that was used to keep Black Americans out of certain neighborhoods less than a century ago — is not lost on them.
“What we’re doing is actually flipping policy back the other way,” Johnson said. “Because this is now public space, we can access public dollars — when the city [wouldn’t typically] give a Black family funds to help save their home.”
And that’s also about zoning, the kind of land use laws that primed the Central Area for development. Over the last few years, Wa Na Wari has worked with the city to make it easier for projects like Wa Na Wari to get approved in single-family zones. “We are using the same policy that harmed us as a tool for liberation,” Johnson said.
Public benefit
Once you notice the artful letters on the front stairs — a poem by Langston Hughes — and the rocking chair on the porch, you feel it: This isn’t an ordinary house. Every corner celebrates Black art and community. It’s in the art quilts hanging from the ceiling in the living room. The Kwanzaa light installation in the backyard. The tap dance performance on the front lawn.
In the span of a few weeks, visitors can attend, for example, a networking event for mental health specialists of color, eat a free “Love Offering” meal — perhaps corned beef or grilled salmon — prepared by local Black and Indigenous chefs, watch a movie, pick up art supplies or take part in an organizing workshop for Black homeowners. Throughout the house, you can see solemn sculptures, exuberant Afrofuturistic collages and installations by local, up-and-coming artists alongside big national and international names — all freely accessible (grants and donations are Wa Na Wari’s main income streams). Or perhaps you’d prefer a laid-back artist talk or art history lecture and wine tasting?
Artists have long fought gentrification and displacement through protest and art. And while there are similar projects that use art to save homes and buildings in Detroit, Houston, Chicago and other cities, Wa Na Wari’s model of involving the family in a nonprofit to hold onto its property is relatively unique.
But it may not be for much longer: Already, other Black families have approached Inye Wokoma to ask: How did you save your family house?
Not everyone’s situation is similar, but “this is a model that could be scaled up,” Johnson said. Not everyone will turn their house into a gallery — some will do it through a bookstore or a studio space or artist residences. “If there’s some type of public benefit that you can attach to your home, then you can access public dollars — that might be the thing that helps your family keep your home.”
Already, Richter said, people are trying to start similar projects in Seattle, including one in Rainier Beach. But, Richter noted, while their creativity should be celebrated, it doesn’t quite make up for the lasting legacy of Seattle’s history of segregation or solve the continuing discrimination Black homebuyers face today.
Still, it’s just one more example of “making a way out of no way.” And that’s not just a Green family thing: “Black families were able to persevere and use their ingenuity and creativity to create something that was sustainable,” Ibiere Seck said, sitting near her siblings as the afternoon sky turned dark.
“You know, I think of it as something being much bigger than what we’re doing,” she added. “We’re starting here. And hopefully, our children and our grandchildren and other families will see that, they can do something similar, and they’re going to build on what we built upon.”
The timeline in this story has been updated to add a September 2024 appeal in the probate case.
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